Timezone handling

[Russ Tyndall]

On 7/24/2013 10:37 AM, Julien Danjou wrote:
> Not really unfortunatelly, unless I've missed the obvious. I've still 
> have no clue on how to insert "2013-01-01 12:00:00 UTC" into PG. Your 
> first example inserted "2013-01-01 04:00:00 UTC", and the second 
> example inserted "2013-01-01 03:00:00 UTC". Thanks! 

Baring the rest of the issues you might be experiencing with these 
layered systems, "2013-01-01 11:00:00" is considered timezoneless (ie: 
local zone of whatever computer is interpreting it).  If you wish to 
insert "2013-01-01 04:00:00 UTC" the correct spelling is "2013-01-01 
04:00:00Z" or "2013-01-01 04:00:00+0" which are two spellings of a 
timestamp in UTC.  Both should be recognized by postegresql correctly.

This call to local-time:format-timestring should allow you to produce 
timestamps in the correct zone.
(local-time:format-timestring nil
      (local-time:encode-timestamp 0 0 0 12 01 01 2013)
      :timezone local-time:+utc-zone+)

This wikipedia article should help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Hope this helps,
Russ Tyndall
Acceleration.net
Software Developer